Make-up to smile about

The Journal

Lauren Luke would be the first to admit she’s an unlikely celebrity. Painfully shy, chronically bullied at school and a teenage mum from a poor area in South Tyneside, she certainly doesn’t fit the classic mould of the celebrity. Yet this quiet, self-effacing 26-year-old has attracted an audience of millions and the interest of multi-national cosmetics corporations. And Riveredge Cosmetic Dentistry are giving her a self-confidence boosting smile makeover.

“It’s all been a bit overwhelming,” she admits.

Lauren has attracted over 12 million hits on internet video website YouTube. People from all over the world are tuning in to Lauren’s DIY beauty videos to learn how to apply different make-up looks. The videos started early last year when Lauren began selling make-up through the website ebay. She bulk buys products and sells them on, but her customers began asking her how to use the products.

She explains: “I couldn’t use the pictures from the cosmetic companies because they were all covered by copyright. So I began putting make-up looks on myself to show how the products could work. And then I started getting emails from people asking how I managed to put the make-up on like that.”

Lauren then posted these looks on the YouTube website. Within weeks she was getting thousands of hits and within months, millions. “I was a bit scared when I started to see how many people were looking at the videos but I got such a good response I carried on.” With her millions of viewers Lauren received hundreds of emails, “mainly lovely but the odd nasty one,” she says, about her DIY beauty videos.

Lauren’s most watched videos are those showing how to get the make-up “look” from a celebrity’s music video or film appearance. “Everything really started taking off when I did a Leona Lewis video.” Since the Leona Lewis “look” video, and her millions of hits, Lauren has been contacted by a number of curious big beauty industry players.

But it doesn’t stop there. Lauren is currently in top secret talks with a multi-national cosmetics company about producing her own line. “I really can’t say anything about it but I have been flown out of the UK to talk about it. It’s all in a crucial stage but it is very, very, exciting.”

One of the added bonuses of Lauren’s fame is that Riveredge Cosmetic Dentists in Jesmond, Newcastle, heard about her, and then realised she had actually written a letter to them asking about how she would go about getting her teeth improved.

Lauren recalls: “I have always been scared of dentists. It is all my own fault I’d got to the stage where my teeth were so bad I’d be even more scared to go so I just gave up. I had a bad dentist when I was younger as well. It’s really, really affected my confidence. I always try to hide my teeth if I’m talking. I don’t want to smile either. Some people get the wrong idea about me I think because I do try not to smile.”

Lauren’s about to be able to smile though. She’s part way through treatment to give her a beautiful smile. And she can’t wait. “It has transformed how I feel about dentists. I’m just so excited about getting the work done and being able to smile. I know having a nice set of teeth is going to make a huge difference to my life. And it’ll help with the videos as well because I won’t be hiding them then either.”

It’s good to know Lauren, who has helped to change other people’s lives and to give them more confidence, is going to be able to get more confidence herself. “The best thing about all of this has been knowing I’ve helped to make a difference to people’s lives. I’ve had emails and messages from Brunei, USA, France, Australia, I get quite a few hits from China, from absolutely everywhere really. Some are really sweet, from people who say I’ve given them much more confidence and I even had one from a woman saying her husband was chasing her around the bedroom again after years of marriage. Make-up doesn’t totally change you but it can help give people more confidence and if I’m giving more people confidence then that makes me really, really, happy.”

Visit Lauren’s YouTube site on www.youtube.com/user/panacea81